1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to serial communication and, more particularly, to automatic lane failure recovery.
2. Description of the Related Art
Highly available computer systems require fault tolerance on components that are likely to fail. Of the many components in a system, interconnects between devices may be subject to one or more lanes of a communication link failing. For example, serial communication links using bundled serializer/deserializer (SerDes) lanes may experience lane failures. In some systems, a lane failure may take down the entire link. In other systems, a lane failure may require software intervention to recover. However, software recovery mechanisms cannot generally prevent a system failure. The software recovery mechanism is usually triggered on a reboot, during which the software recovery mechanism may reconfigure the hardware. Thus software intervention may not be a satisfactory solution. Further, in some systems, recovery may include a operating with degraded error protection capabilities. Thus, many of the conventional recovery mechanisms available today do not meet many of the requirements of a highly reliable system.